“And you didn’t see anybody else with them. Anybody that might have been facing them, maybe they were talking to . . .”
“No. I mean, like I said, I wasn’t studying them, but no.”
“And you and Randal, where were you relative to each other when the shot was fired.”
“I would say I was right here,” she said, hugging herself and staring down at her shoes. “And Randal was maybe by that building down there with the mermaid heads carved on it?”—pointing to a tenement maybe a hundred feet south, three doorways up from the corner with Delancey, two reporters standing there now, both on cell phones.
“I have a distinct mental picture of him and I walking towards each other with those three across the street between us so that we all made kind of a triangle, and then all of a sudden hearing that sharp pop and seeing the two of them fall away and the third guy with the silver in his hand run into the building. Next thing I know Randal’s on top of me trying to push me down below this car,” nodding to a parked Lexus. “Sir Galahad,” she added drily.
“What’s that?” Bobby smiled.
“Nikki, you OK?” A young couple still dressed in their evening clothes but carrying coffee and newspapers got in between Bobby and his interview as if he weren’t there at all. The girl was blond, the boy light-skinned black like Nikki.
“I just saw someone get shot,” she blurted.
“What?” the girl gasped.
“It was like nothing. It was like they slipped on ice.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it is,” the black kid said sagely, Bobby thinking, Straight Outta Scarsdale.
“Shot dead?”
Nikki leaned around her friend to get the answer from Bobby, who tapped his watch.
“I’ll call you.” Nikki stepped away from them.
“Be careful what you say,” the boy murmured as they walked off.
“What?” Nikki looked after him. “Why?”
The boy cast a chary eye Bobby’s way, then kept walking.
“Why?” Nikki looked anxiously to Bobby.
Bobby shrugged. “Your friend there watches too much TV. Why did you just call your boyfriend Sir Galahad like that?”
“Did what?” Still distracted, then pursing her mouth and staring over Bobby’s head. “It’s . . . I was joking.”
Bobby gave it a second, was about to push for more, when the abrupt racket of a security gate going up over a storefront Buddhist temple made her levitate.
“Am I putting myself in any kind of danger talking to you?”
“None whatsoever,” he said without blinking. “So where were you both coming from before you separated?”
“My girlfriend’s birthday party at this club Rose of Sharon on Essex?”
“Were you drinking?”
“I can’t. I’m allergic to alcohol.”
“Were you altered in any other way?”
“Was I stoned?”
Bobby waited.
“I had a few tokes earlier, but way earlier, like midnight, and it was just to be sociable and so that everybody would get off my back for not drinking. So, four hours later?” She shrugged. “I was just tired.”
“All right.” Bobby nodded. “All right.” Then, “Look, I’m obliged to ask. Have you ever had any history with the police?”
“Like, have I ever been arrested?” Cocking her head.
Bobby waited.
“Would you ask me that if I were white?”
“On something like this? I would ask you that if you were Korean.”
“No, I haven’t any history with the police,” she said tersely. “Now. Can I ask you something?”
“Absolutely,” Bobby said, his eyes on to the next thing.
“OK, it’s like, the cops are pointing guns at you, and they’re yelling for you to drop the gun, put it down, put it the fuck down, but they’re also yelling for you to freeze. So, which one do you do?”
“Which do you think?” he said. “But slowly.”
A moment later Matty came back from his interview around the corner with the boyfriend, Bobby seeing the new story in his eyes too.
The first order of business now was finding the gun Eric Cash had dumped. After putting in a request for a search team from Emergency Services to give 27 Eldridge a top-to-bottom toss, Matty went back to the squad room, sat quietly at his desk for a minute to gather himself, then started working the request lines for more manpower.
When he was done with that, he called Bobby back at the scene to have him steer Crime Scenes, if and when they ever showed up, directly to the precinct before processing the street. He then got up and glanced through the window of the interview room at Eric Cash, slumped with his cheek resting on the edge of the scarred table in there, an untouched cup of coffee inches from his face. Matty wanted CSU to come here first to give this guy a gunshot-residue test, without which, if he truly was the shooter and the murder weapon remained unfound, they could possibly be screwed, depending on how tough he would hang during the interviews; how quick he’d lawyer up.
Matty put a hand to the door, then backed off; let him stew.
Back at his desk he started to call his most immediate boss, Lieutenant Carmody, but hung up middial. The guy was supposed to be informed 24/7 whenever anything of this magnitude went down in the precinct, but he was new, would only get in the way, and wouldn’t want to know about it anyhow.
Instead, he called Bobby Oh again.
“Where the fuck’s CSU?”
“What can I tell you.”
“No gun?”
“You’d know.” Then, “You better call them.”
Matty gave himself one last moment to breathe, to think of a bamboo forest or an alpine brook, whatever they might look or sound like, then put in the call to Crime Scenes, praying he wouldn’t get the Goalie.
“Baumgartner.”
“Yeah, hey, Sarge,” Matty thinking, Fuck me, “this is Matty Clark, Eighth Squad? I have a homicide down here, a possible perp in custody but no gun, and I need a paraffin test.”
“Homicide?”
“Yes.”
“Confirmed?”
“Yes.”
“At.”
“Gouverneur’s.”
“Doctor’s name?”
Matty checked his notes. “Prahash, Samram Prahash.”
“And he’s the perp why?”
“We have two wits.”
“Any visible residue on clothing or hands?”
“I believe so, yes,” Matty lied.
“What time was the shooting?”
Matty took a breath, knowing where this was going. “Roughly oh-four-thirty,” making it later by half an hour.
“And what time is it now?”
Look at the fucking wall clock; Matty envisioning Baumgartner sitting there, the guy as big as a sea lion with a mustache to match.
“Sarge?” Baumgartner singsonged. “What time is it now?”
“Oh-six-thirty, about.” Pedantic douche.
“All right,” the Goalie sighed, “I’ll have to reach out to my boss for this, but I’ll tell you, as I’m sure you know already, once you’re past two hours a paraffin test’s inconclusive.”
“Look,” Matty said through his teeth, “when you get your boss on the horn, tell him that the chiefs are already all over this,” he lied again. “Tell him we already have more news trucks than residents down there. Tell him we got a major shitstorm on our hands.”
“All right,” Baumgartner said, “I’ll get back to you.”
“Call me direct.” Matty gave him his cell number.
“Name again?”
“Clark. Sergeant Matthew Clark. Eighth Squad.”
At 7:00 a.m., two of Matty’s detectives, Yolonda Bello and John Mullins, were at 2030 Henry Hudson Parkway in Riverdale, a whitebrick twenty-five-story monstrosity overlooking the river with a near-primordial view of the Jersey Palisades. It was not Isaac Marcus’s current address, that would be a five-man crash pad in Cobble Hill,
an Our Gang, pot-stanky garden apartment in which none of his just woken roomies could even tell the detectives where Ike originally hailed from. Riverdale was the address on his driver’s license, also home to a William Marcus, presumably the father or at least a blood relation.
The two cops assigned to the visit were chosen because the Riverdale address was pretty much on their way in to work: Yolonda living only three blocks away, Mullins ten minutes north in Yonkers. John tended to come off as an impassive hulk, not his fault really, but Yolonda, when in the mood, was the best at this, with huge liquid eyes that seemed perpetually on the verge of tears and a voice like a hug. When they identified themselves as detectives to the fortyish barefoot woman who met them at the door, she went from sleepy to irate in a heartbeat.
“Oh, for Christ sakes, did that psycho file a complaint or something?”
“What?” an alarmed teenage girl announced her presence in the dining alcove. “What do you mean a complaint. What’s a complaint?”
“That kid had been beating the crap out of her all game and she got what was coming to her. The ref didn’t even call a flagrant,” the woman went at Yolonda. “She was the one tripping, throwing elbows, talking all kinds of shit, and there’s a hundred witnesses that’ll back that up. I mean, Jesus Christ, did you take a look at the size of her?”
The woman was wearing a carefully ripped pair of jeans and a freshly ironed white T-shirt.
“I go in today, I’m dead.” The girl in a straight-out panic now. “I told you!”
“Calm down, Nina. Nobody’s dead,” the woman said, then turned back to the silent detectives. “This is complete and utter horseshit.”
Whatever these two were talking about, it was either relevant or not, Yolonda thought, but it would have to keep for at least a few minutes.
“Does Isaac Marcus live here?” she finally asked.
“Isaac?” Yolonda’s soft, apologetic tone immediately slowed the woman down. “No, he lives in Brooklyn I think.” Then, “What do you want with Ike?”
“No way I’m going to school today,” the girl moaned to herself.
“What do you want with Ike?” the woman repeated, her voice getting smaller.
“Are you his mother?”
“No. Yeah. No, no.” Stark-eyed now, she began stepping in place, raised a finger like a saint. “I’m married. To his father. Remarried. What’s wrong.”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Mine?”
Yolonda waited, thinking, She’s there already.
“Minette. Minette Davidson.”
“Minette,” Yolonda said, then without asking eased herself across the threshold and steered the woman to her own couch, Mullins following silently, his gaze straying to the prehistoric bluffs across the river.
Lost in her own panic, the young girl did everyone a favor by marching out of the dining area. A moment later a door slammed.
“Please,” Minette said, an open-ended entreaty.
“Is his father home?” Yolonda asked, following the script.
“He’s upstate.”
Yolonda and John glanced at each other, upstate to them a euphemism.
“At a conference. He’ll be back tonight. What is it . . .”
“Do you know how we can reach him?”
“Oh, please!”
Enough.
“Minette . . .” The woman tried to rise but Yolonda put a hand on her shoulder, then squatted on her haunches to be on eye level. “We have some really bad news.”
Minette shot to her feet despite Yolonda’s staying hand, then, not waiting for the details, swirled to the floor like a leaf.
Unwilling to leave Minette Davidson alone with her daughter, Yolonda called in to Matty, then she and John stayed in the apartment for the thirty minutes it took until Minette’s sister finally showed up. During that time, no one approached the girl, oblivious behind her closed bedroom door.
According to Yolonda via the guy’s wife, a high school Spanish teacher at a prep school in Riverdale, the dead kid’s father worked for Con Ed, a project manager on toxic remediation sites, whatever the hell those were, and was currently up at a Marriott near Tarrytown for a two-day seminar on hot-spot removal, whatever the hell that was.
Matty was about to ring the Tarrytown PD to request a notification when Kendra Walker, one of the Night Watch detectives, came in to use the bathroom, her belt half-undone before she even knew where it was located.
“That way.” Matty pointed from his desk. “Hey, did CSU ever show?”
“Yeah, they just got there when I was leaving. Bobby’s talking to them now, trying to get ’em to come by for that GSR test you wanted? But I think I heard one guy say they never got an order to do that, so . . .”
“Never what?”
“Yeah, sorry there, Sarge.” Kendra shrugged and headed for the bathroom.
“Baumgartner.”
“You talk to your boss yet?”
“Who’s this?”
“Matty Clark, Eighth Squad.”
“He gets in at eight.”
“I thought you were gonna reach out for him right after we talked? Eight? You didn’t tell me that.” Matty tried to curb his anger, there being no percentage in pissing off this guy, who would only put you at the back of the line the next time you needed CSU fast.
“Well, I can tell you right now what he’s gonna say.” Baumgartner chewing something. “Which is that for something like this, the request’s got to come from higher up than you, division captain at least.”
“Hey”—Matty grinning with rage—“couldn’t you tell me that the first time? You know, with us playing beat the clock here?”
“I’m just telling you how it is.”
“This better be good.” The voice of Mangini, the division captain, came over the line like crusted glue.
“Cap”—Matty wincing—“Matty Clark from the Eighth, are you up?”
“Am now.” Mangini coughed.
“Sorry there, boss. What time you due in?”
“Noon.”
“Yeah, we have a situation down here, a homicide, we maybe got the shooter, two eyewits say he’s the shooter, but we haven’t found the gun as yet, and I need CSU to do a paraffin test.”
“So?”
“I need a boss to make the call.”
“The fuck, it’s not even seven yet.”
“It’s seven-thirty. The thing is, I need this done now, it’s already going on three and a half hours.”
The captain abruptly smothered his receiver, Matty stuck paradiddling a pencil on his blotter as he endured the muffled halftones of Mangini arguing with his wife, whom he had probably just woken up by taking this call in bed.
“All right, what?” The cap back on the line.
“How about this . . .” Matty sitting there, palms up and out. “How about I have one of my guys call over there and just say they’re you.”
“Sure, whatever.” Then, “Wait. For a paraffin test?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you just tell me you got two eyewits?”
“I did, but—”
“Then what do you need a paraffin test for?”
“Because I want one. Because I’m thinking better safe than sorry.”
The cap sighed. Matty envisioned him lying there, his hair sticking up against his pillow.
“All right, look.” Mangini coughed, sniffed. “You want to do me a favor? Call the DI for this, clear it with him.”
“Berkowitz?” Matty pinching his brows. “What time’s he get in?”
“Eight, about.”
With bosses, eight could mean eight, could mean nine, could mean ten; ten o’clock, six hours after the shooting.
Matty hung up, rang up Deputy Inspector Berkowitz, got the machine, left his situation and cell number, and that was all he could do.
He got up to check on Eric Cash again, then stopped, what was he forgetting . . .
Sitting back down, he finally called
the Tarrytown cops to notify Isaac Marcus’s father at his hotel, although by now the guy’s wife in Riverdale had to have given him the news.
No one had a clue as to where to find the kid’s mother.
The moment he hung up, his cell went off, Matty hoping for Berkowitz, for Bobby Oh.
“Hey, Matty.” The squad boss, Carmody, on the line. “I was just watching the news. What the hell’s going on down there?”
“Yeah, hey, Lieutenant, I didn’t want to bother you, we got it under control.”
“You need me to come in?”
“We’re good, boss, thanks.”
“All right, call me if something changes.”
“Absolutely, boss.”
From his desk he saw Eric Cash being escorted to the bathroom, walking from the interview room as if he should be wearing an open-backed hospital gown.
At seven-thirty, roughly three and a half hours after the murder, the redheaded witness, Randal Condo, was, for the third time since coming forward, once again standing across the street from 27 Eldridge, this time with Kevin Flaherty, an assistant district attorney from the Prosecutor’s Office.
“. . . the three of them arm in arm in arm like a chorus line. They were right under the streetlight. It was like they were on a stage.”
By now the crime scene was down to the tape, a bloodstained sidewalk, a pair of discarded inside-out surgical gloves, and a scatter of lesser reporters like boys at a dance trying to figure out the best way to approach the prosecutor and the witness across the street.
“They were facing you?” The ADA, a still-young ex-cop, offered up some gum, his now regrettably tattooed wrist, a trompe l’oeil ring of barbed wire, peeking out from beneath his stiff white shirt cuff like a bracelet.
“No, with their backs to me. I was walking up from the corner towards Nikki.”
“Your girlfriend.”
For a brief moment they both took five as a tall blond girl on a bicycle stopped directly in front of them to watch the action, the tattoo at the base of her spine drifting up from the ass of her jeans like blue smoke.
Lush Life Page 6